Making The Score Come Alive

@sinclairmusic from Greenwood Lake, New York brought these three minutes of loveliness to Miss Mussel’s attention this morning via Twitter. The video is a stop motion representation of Aaron Copland’s Hoedown from the ballet Rodeo (1942) created by Eleanor Stewart as her final degree project at the Glasgow School of Art. Well done, Eleanor!

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3 comments

This is really well done. Interestingly, it turns out to be the “Haydown” from Rodeo since all the score excerpts are from Haydn symphonies (presumably due to copyright concerns on the artist’s part.) It’s too bad she couldn’t have played around with Copland’s actual notes, but it was fun trying to figure out the source – she did a good job of picking mostly Hoedownesqe passages from Haydn. For me, the tipoff was the opening of the “Oxford” Symphony that you can briefly glimpse between 1:16 and 1:17.

I do have a pretty big monitor. I also have to admit it took me some time to figure this out – unfortunately, that kind of puzzle drives me crazy, so I wasn’t going to be denied. I couldn’t read the titles (although I had a vague sense that each titled page said something like “Symphonie ??”), but the music has a Haydnesque look. As it happens, we study the Oxford Symphony in my music history class every year, so I’ve looked at that music a lot – the first page stays on screen for some time around 1:52. I think there’s some “Surprise” and “Military” symphony in there as well.

By the way, I don’t think this takes away from the spectacular achievement at all, and I like how Stewart created a fake cover page for Copland. It looks just like something you’d find in an old basement.